The Walking Sun | Abhishta Lalwani

A celebration of Australia’s multiculturalism through food.

The Walking Sun is a festive wheel of prosperity, bringing different and stories and elements together as it turns - Nadim Karam

Our platform follows the same spirit as proposed by Nadim Karam.

Design Brief:

We aim to design a service that aims at fostering cultural reconnection through a community centered online platform. It provides migrants with resources that helps them engage with and experience their cultural festivals away from home.

Melbourne's Ethnic Population Distribution

Proportion of population born overseas, 1911-2021.png

• The proportion of the population who were born overseas has increased in all states and territories since 2006.

• In 2021, the states with the highest proportions of overseas-born were Western Australia (32.2%), Victoria (29.9%) and New South Wales (29.3%).

The Theory of Acculturation

Much of the acculturation literature relies on Berry’s (1997) fourfold model that delineates possible acculturation strategies that immigrants adopt, based on the strength of their orientations to old ethnic or new host cultures.

Multicultural_acculturation-e1657405870340 Blue.png

Interviews & Insights

We conducted two rounds of interviews - the first round in- cluded older migrants as participants, the second round was for the businesses in Dandenong (grocery stores, restaurants and caterers) since we found that these were the main food- based businesses catering to people in Melbourne.

Our first round of interviews was done keeping in mind ethnic grocery stores and restaurants as we thought that older migrants go to purchase their groceries physically in stores and have interactions there and restaurants was due to family outings and a chance to socially connect. These were the two main points of interaction we could think of, however, upon interviewing restaurant and grocery store owners, we found that caterers are also a strong point of contact.

After conducting the interviews, we collated all the key insights from the inter- views across all types of segments and found common themes in these insights which we could group together and come up with features for our service. These features would be at the core of what we would be designing as it would set the precedent for what we want our service to focus on.

How might we:

Facilitate a mutually beneficial connection between older migrants and migrant-owned businesses in Melbourne to enhance their ties to their home culture and promote a stronger sense of belonging within their communities?

Design Precedents

01. Filipino Food Movement Australia

• Connecting generations through traditional food, sharing and passing on traditional food culture

• Community gatherings and events contribute to the exchange and integration of food cultures

02. Free to Feed Community Cooking Experiences

• Designed to aid in the exchange of powerful memories, form life long connections, shape conversations and celebrate the ambition of newly arrived people.

Empowering Social Connectedness

The Vision

• Our focus is on building smart cities through smarter communities

• To be a link between communities and empower them to challenge the idea of CBD being the core of what defines a “smart” city

Empowers Small Businesses

By providing them a community- based platform and creating a self-sustaining system

Empowers Cultural Values

By helping people preserve their culture and promote different cultures

Empowers The Local Economy

By promoting migrant-owned businesses that contribute to the total economy of the city

Empowers Older Generations

By challenging the idea of smart cities being limited to favouring a certain age group only

Process & Explorations

Brainwriting exercise for ideation of concepts

Coming to the development process of the service, we began ideating using an exercise called Brainwriting, where each member came up with 5 ideas and the rest of the members built on each other’s idea. Brainwriting is similar to brain- storming: it can be used to generate new ideas, encourage creative prob- lem-solving, and develop innovative solutions. But, instead of getting people to discuss ideas out loud, brainwriting gets people to write them down then, each person passes his or her ideas to the next person who uses them as a trigger for adding or refining their own ideas.

After shortlisting 3 concepts and exploring them further, we went ahead with the idea of a digital database for festive food items and ingredients mainly in grocery stores in the form of a kiosk. Another key feature was highlighting mi- grant stories on the database. After mul- tiple feedback rounds from the industry partner, the concept further developed to integrate other businesses such as restaurants and caterers. We shifted our focus from a business oriented data- base to a community centred platform that included events to increase social connectedness.

Wireframes

Stakeholder Map

In order to establish our target group we created a behavioural archetype based on the insights from the interviews we conducted and the characteristics of the culture segments of 'Essence' & 'Enrichment' (Refer to https://www.mhminsight.com/en_au/culture-segments/).

"The Old Soul"

(Essence + Enrichment)

Culture is essential to their very being. It’s the fibre of their character. They have reverence for the past and a value of heritage. For them, learning the origins of something heightens its worth and is enriching. They enjoy making sense of the world, and appreciate how the heritage of things helps us understand how we got here.